291–300 of 424 posts
lithium is just cheap because it wrecks some 3rd world countries natural resources. If they'd slap the price of recovery times it will need to regrow nature in that place, it wouldn't be as cheap.
We would just scale up extraction from the ocean, lithium is very prevalent.
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The rate of change has been stable over the last 15 years, do you bet it continues for a 16th year or that it stops this year?
The paper says "We estimate that between 1992 and 2016, real price per energy capacity declined 13% per year". Where do you get your data for the last 5 years? Regardless, 1 year isn't the correct duration for a bet. People average owning a car for ~6 years, and the average lifespan is something like 12 years. But depending on terms, I might take a year-over-year bet for battery prices. Demand is high and the pandemi…
Lithium prices have gone down in the last few years, and Cobalt isn’t a necessary component.
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These are not the same kind of stupid. One makes the assumption that costs will always be the same, and the other makes the assumption that cost decreases are linear, or predictable. The former is much stupider.
Agreed. A first-order approximation leaves a lot to be desired, but it's better than a zeroth-order approximation.
If you're coming up to the end of a logistic ("S") curve, then assuming a linear growth (or worse, a fixed rate of increase each year, ie exponential growth) is much worse of an assumption than assuming zero change, if you extrapolate too far.
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Far north New Zealand, 4 bedroom house, no insulation, no double glazing, electric hot water and cooking. 9-10 kWh/day October-May, ~18 kWh/day June-September (dehumidifier). Wood burner (about US$150/winter) when the heat from the dehumidifier isn't enough to maintain 20 C.
Remarkable. I’m in Sydney, my house sounds similar by description but I have gas hot water and stovetop. My house uses over 5 kWh/day for ambient/idle power alone.
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The rate of change has been stable over the last 15 years, do you bet it continues for a 16th year or that it stops this year?
The paper says "We estimate that between 1992 and 2016, real price per energy capacity declined 13% per year". Where do you get your data for the last 5 years? Regardless, 1 year isn't the correct duration for a bet. People average owning a car for ~6 years, and the average lifespan is something like 12 years. But depending on terms, I might take a year-over-year bet for battery prices. Demand is high and the pandemi…
Meanwhile LiFePO4 batteries, which are currently the most popular chemistry(at least in China), contain no cobalt whatsoever.
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This same problem has plagued climate science as well, giving munition for deniers and otherwise just confusing the public. You want to see the real writing on the wall? The IPCC report takes 10 year old settled science and makes models using it. The real, more recent data is much, much worse.
> The real, more recent data is much, much worse. Where can I read anything on this?
Basically, the IPCC doesn't publish studies - they study compilations of studies, every 4-5 years. And when they start compiling, they have a cut-off date at the very start and only use studies that have been both completed and have passed peer review from before that date.
Meanwhile, the studies themselves have the same problem - they obviously can't start the study with incomplete data and update the data as they go. The studies need to start with data that finished before they started the study.
And on top of that, they're necessarily a reserved body (Icd say "conservative" but that's ambiguous in politics) - IPCC is run by a bunch of governments trying to figure out the bare minimum of emissions reduction they need to commit to, to not be negligent - they don't want to hear bad news unless it's certain.
The end result is that the data in the report is 10+ years out of date.
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Yes, using obsolete data from when tech was bleeding edge in 1999 to imply things about cost going forward is misleading. On the other hand using improvement over the same timeline, drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid but pointed in a different direction. In 1991 lithium was highly immature technology and would take about a decade to make it into…
These are not the same kind of stupid. One makes the assumption that costs will always be the same, and the other makes the assumption that cost decreases are linear, or predictable. The former is much stupider.
Technology follows an S curve. First it increases slowly, then faster, then more slowly again. It's silly to assume mature technologies will keep getting better at the same rate and silly to assume immature technologies won't get better. Without specifying the technology, one assumption isn't really sillier than the other - physical limits are unintuitive.
This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perf…
It’s remarkable what energy dense batteries have enabled. Drones and the entire quadcopter scene wouldn’t be possible without them. Some maneuvers made on a 5” quad can pull more than 100 amps on a 6S, 22V battery. That is around 2,200 watts—more than most consumer microwave ovens! The fact that a battery weighing no more than half a kilogram can supply this much power almost instantly is truly remarkable.